Running Dell DSET 3.2 on CentOS 6.2

Earlier today I was working with Dell Support to gather information about a broken system. It was suggested that I use their DSET utility to gather data and return a report. The problem is, DSET doesn’t natively support CentOS, so some tweaks were needed in order for it to run properly. In this post I’ll outline the changes I needed to make in order to run DSET on CentOS 6.2.

Note: If you get an error saying that the file is not in a valid archive format, you may need to alter the tail command slightly. Use the following command to determine the line at which the archive begins:awk '/^__ARCHIVE_BELOW__/ {print NR + 1; exit 0; }' dell-dset-3.2.0.141_x64_A01.bin

Step 3: Trick the installer into thinking you’re running a supported OS
The installer uses the /etc/issue and /etc/redhat-release files to determine the operating system. The trick here is to update those files on your system to match one of the supported operating systems listed in the included archive. Look at the support_os_list file found in your working directory (~/dell), and update your files to match one of the listed systems. For CentOS 6.2 I used the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6 x86_64 entry.